Earth Day’s ‘power, planet, propaganda’
It is Earth Day 2025, the central religious holiday of the environmental left, and the theme this year is “Our Power, Our PlanetTM.” That “TM” trademark symbol is both a reality and a joke. It is a reality in that the organizers of Earth Day actually found it appropriate to trademark “Our Power, Our PlanetTM.” The joke: It is a theme supremely vacuous, reflecting the rock-bottom analytic quality of their thinking. Do they actually believe that anyone would plagiarize something so infantile?
Always determined to control the lives of billions of people around the globe — the Earth Day crowd specializes in making demands driven by endless falsehoods — the central admonition this year is a tripling of global renewable electricity generation by 2030. Global renewable electricity generation in 2023 was about 9,000 terawatt-hours, an amount triple that of the 2003-2004 period. Accordingly, another tripling in less than five years is preposterous, in that the expansion of renewable electricity generation — already fantastically expensive (see below) — necessarily would take place in regions and sites increasingly unsuitable for such power production. The best sites are used first; in economic jargon, there are enormous scale diseconomies characterizing the renewables industry as it expands.
This is despite the massive subventions and favoritism bestowed upon renewable electricity — wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and a few others — in particular in the developed economies. It is therefore not very surprising that renewable electricity generation has grown; if we subsidize something heavily, we will get more of it.
Accordingly, the claim that renewable power is “cheap” is propaganda; if renewable electricity is so cheap, why does it need massive subsidies and guaranteed market shares and all the rest? The answer is obvious: Renewable power is not cheap, in particular when we add the cost of backup generation needed to prevent service interruptions caused by the inherent unreliability of wind and solar power.
The cost estimates (Table 1b) from the Energy Information Administration for electricity generation with alternative technologies are as follows, in year 2024 dollars per megawatt-hour, including the $132.65 per megawatt hour cost of that backup generation. Combined-cycle natural gas generation: $44.95. “Ultra-super critical” coal: $92.98. Nuclear: $99.31. Photovoltaic solar: $173.72. Onshore wind: $177.93. Offshore wind: $286.29. Unconventional power is not competitive.
Ignore also the propaganda that renewable power is “clean,” an assertion that ignores the attendant environmental damage: heavy-metal pollution, wildlife destruction, noise and flicker effects, massive land use and degradation of vistas, landfill problems, and on and on.
The Earth Day “tripling” nostrum is justified with the usual mindless assertion that a “climate crisis” is upon us. That is false. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Sixth Assessment Report (Table 12.12) concedes implicitly that there is no such crisis, as every predicted adverse effect of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases is driven by one scenario, ”representative concentration pathway 8.5.” IPCC notes (p. 238) that “the likelihood of high emissions scenarios such as RCP8.5 … is considered low…” In reality, RCP8.5 is essentially impossible.
There is little trend in the number of “hot” days since 1895; eleven of the twelve years with the highest number of such days occurred before 1960. (This is because standard textbook atmospheric physics predicts not an increase in average highs, but instead an increase in average lows.) The U.S. Climate Reference Network data show no temperature trend over the available 2005–2023 reporting period. Global mean sea level has been increasing at about 3.3 mm per year since satellite measurements began in 1993, or about thirteen inches over the course of a century, an outcome very unlikely to prove a “crisis.”
The arctic sea ice has been declining, but the degree to which anthropogenic GHG emissions are the cause is wholly unclear. There is no long-term trend in the Antarctic sea ice. U.S. tornado activity for shows an no trend since 1950. The data for the period since 1970 for strong tornadoes show a downward trend. Tropical cyclones and accumulated cyclone energy show no trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s.
The number of U.S. wildfires shows no trend since 1985. Wildfire acreage has increased, but that has nothing to do with GHG emissions; it is the result of perverse forest management practices, for the most part in government forests. Global acreage burned declined sharply for 1998-2015, and by about eighteen percent for the period 2003-2015 as reported by NASA. The Palmer Drought Severity index shows no trend for the United States since 1895. There is no global drought trend over the last 120 years, and for 1950-2020 the trend is downward (Figure 2). U.S. flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing GHG concentrations. IPCC in the AR6 reports low confidence (p. 1568) in the purported responsibility of atmospheric GHG concentrations for changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods at the global scale. Populations of polar bears have been increasing sharply. The available data do not support the ubiquitous assertions about the dire impacts of declining pH levels in the oceans.
The leftist opposition to fossil fuels has nothing to do with environmental quality or climate issues or any of the other rationalizations repeated ad nauseam. It is instead a central component of the fundamental anti-human core of left-wing environmentalism, a stance that studiously ignores the relationship between fossil fuel use and human flourishing. In 1990, the late Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome in 1968, argued in the context of the use of DDT to control malaria:
My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. … My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.
Tens or hundreds of millions of the world’s poor have died from malaria as a direct result of the multination ban on the use of DDT, driven by false assertions about its harmful effects on various bird species, promulgated from the very first Earth Day in 1970. Then there was the observation made in 1971 by Michael McClosky, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, during an Ethiopian famine:
The worst thing we could do is give aid…. the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance and to let the people there just starve.
For left-wing environmental ideologues, humans are nothing more than environmentally destructive mouths to feed without moral standing. (The Nazi term was “useless eaters.”) Nor, implicitly, do humans have the intelligence, inventiveness, and ingenuity to solve problems. Au contraire: Simply because of the laws of large numbers, some substantial numbers of people are and will be geniuses.
I return, as I have so many times, to the wisdom of Dogbert: “You can’t save the earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.” That is the true theme of all Earth Days, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever.
Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.